Oh me, oh my

Let me give you some advice

Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization. By Gordon Brown. Free Press; 314 pages; $26. Simon & Schuster; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

MANY politicians use their memoirs to settle old scores. Newspapers scour them for juicy titbits of who said what to whom, and which leaders were perpetually drunk or unreliable. Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, is above such gossip. His first post-election effort is an analysis of the financial crisis that dominated his premiership.

But “Beyond the Crash” is no less revealing for the absence of tittle-tattle. The tone is set in the four-page prologue which contains 34 instances of the words “I”, “me” or “my”. Later on, readers are told of several occasions when an anecdote by Mr Brown would reduce global leaders to silence or a speech would provoke rounds of applause from audiences.

Such is his self-regard that Mr Brown seems to lack all sense of irony, as when he reports, with an apparently straight face, this remark from the Norwegian prime minister: “You know, I've been a friend of Gordon's since we first started attending events like this a decade ago, and every time since I've heard him give exactly the same speech!” What Mr Brown regards as an inspiring pep talk, others might see as insulting banality. When he told an African Union summit “It is time to rise. Rise, because just as Africa needs the world, the world needs Africa”, how many leaders were tempted to respond with a rude noise on their vuvuzelas?

The pity of it is that an intelligent man appears to have been seduced by the sound of his own voice. Mr Brown's analysis of the crisis is clear-headed and the broad outline of his economic proposals appears sound, and not just because it chimes with various recommendations made by this newspaper. America needs to devote less resources to consumption and more to investment in education; Europe needs structural reform to improve its labour market; China needs domestic reform to boost consumption.

Mr Brown can also claim to have shown good judgment in three crucial decisions of his political career: giving independence to the Bank of England, opposing British membership of the euro and recapitalising the troubled banks in the autumn of 2008. In those days, he played a vital role in averting depression.

But all too often, he allows sloganeering to overwhelm practical proposals. In the final chapter, “Markets Need Morals”, the reader looks in vain for a bit of detail about how such a code might be imposed. All Mr Brown has to say is “the operation of markets must balance the necessary encouragement of risk-taking with proper standards of responsibility.” Indeed, Gordon. But how?

The willingness of other global leaders to take Mr Brown's economic advice seriously will also be reduced when they contemplate the mess that he made of the British domestic economy. His criticisms of the financial sector are harsh and he reproduces a 1998 speech that calls for greater global co-ordination of financial regulation. Mysteriously, he makes no reference to his 2005 speech to the Confederation of British Industry when he said that the regulation of financial services should involve “not just a light touch but a limited touch”. It is all very well being wise “beyond the crash” but it was before the crash where Mr Brown was found wanting.